Happy Thanksgiving! And Don't Forget to Boycott Wal-Mart!

November 20, 2012|Stephen Markley

Turkey Day nears, and we’ve all got big, complicated plans that involve drinking with your high school buddies in all your favorite hometown bars, navigating whatever familial crises and complaints that will arise in the space of 72 hours, and where to take a nap after the wine and turkey and potatoes kick in.

Personally, this ranks up there with the Chik-fil-A boycott in boycotts that I will be able to participate in with no problem. I’d rather try to get a nine-iron up my urethra than go to a Wal-Mart on the most awful shopping day of the year. Still, it’s good to remember, for those of us who don’t work at Wal-Mart and haven’t seen them arrive in towns and exterminate small businesses and drive wages down and occasionally lock employees in their stores, that the WM has some crappy labor practices even by the standards of soulless multi-national corporations.

As many have noted, Wal-Mart’s estimated $13 billion a year in profit largely end up in the hands of like five Walton descendants, and before you break out your Adam Smith and start railing on the benefits of the free market, keep in mind that Wal-Mart is one of the great socialist corporate entities of our time: most of its “associates” get paid so little, they qualify for Medicaid and food stamps. In fact, Wal-Mart is the case in point of why Obamacare forces businesses to either provide health insurance or pay a tax for each employee. It’s one of the ironies of people who deride the 47% of shiftless, no-good moochers that most of them work in jobs for wages the ones making that argument would never find acceptable, and that the actual free-riders are major companies who get away paying workers shit, and the only reason those workers still show up, not sick and not hungry, is because the taxpayer subsidizes Wal-Mart’s disgusting wages.